Astronauts will
fire the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s large orbital maneuvering thrusters
twice today as they make their way toward the International Space Station,
where three fellow space travelers await their Saturday arrival.

Currently flying
approximately 8,000 statute miles (12,875 kilometers) behind and below
the ISS, Endeavour’s crew will spend much of today preparing for
Saturday afternoon’s docking with the station.

Commander Brent
Jett, Pilot Mike Bloomfield and Mission Specialists Joe Tanner, Marc
Garneau and Carlos Noriega will begin checking out the systems they
will use to deliver the station’s first set of U.S. solar arrays.
They will check out the Shuttle’s robotic arm and space vision
system to ensure they are working properly, and inspect the spacesuits
and tools that Tanner and Noriega will use over the course of three
scheduled space walks.

Jett and Bloomfield
will execute rendezvous burns about 12:41 p.m., and 9:15 p.m. to bring
Endeavour into the proper alignment with the ISS and close the gap between
the two spacecraft, still half a world away from each other. The first
burn went flawlessly a little before 1 a.m. Friday.

Aboard the space
station, Commander Bill Shepherd, Pilot Yuri Gidzenko and Flight Engineer
Sergei Krikalev continued preparations for the arrival of Endeavour’s
crew, undocking a Progress supply ship from the Zarya module to make
room for Endeavour at a nearby Unity module docking port. The supply
ship – now full of refuse and packing materials from the crew’s
first month on orbit – was undocked at 10:20 a.m. CST and moved
to a parking orbit some 2,500 kilometers (1,554 miles) away. Over the
next several weeks, Mission managers will be discussing whether or not
to redock the Progress to the ISS late in December.

Endeavour’s
docking with the station remains on schedule for 2 p.m. CST Saturday.
After Garneau and Bloomfield use the Shuttle’s robot arm to attach
the new solar arrays to the connecting framework delivered on STS-92,
Noriega and Tanner will conduct three space walks making connections
and helping activate the new sun-tracking, power generating panels of
the 90-foot tall, 240-foot wide solar array structure.

The crew’s
first full day in orbit began with a wake-up call from Mission Control
at 10:06 a.m. Friday to the sounds of “Stardust” by Willie
Nelson, played for Canadian Space Agency astronaut Garneau. The next
mission status report will be issued at 10 p.m. Friday or sooner if
events warrant.

-end-

NASA Johnson Space Center Mission Status Reports and other information are available automatically
by sending an Internet electronic mail message to majordomo@listserver.jsc.nasa.gov.
In the body of the message (not the subject line) users should type
"subscribe hsfnews" (no quotes). This will add the e-mail
address that sent the subscribe message to the news release distribution
list. The system will reply with a confirmation via e-mail of each subscription.
Once you have subscribed you will receive future news releases via e-mail.